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Hyperscale data centers are not office parks for software engineers. They are industrial facilities, the size of an Amazon warehouse, sometimes ten of them in a row, drawing more power than entire towns and evaporating water by the millions of gallons. The community stopped one from being built on Cedar Creek Lake. Here is why it was the wrong fit, and why the next one would be too, in plain English.
A typical hyperscale campus sits on 100 to 400 acres. Within the fence you'll find:
The campus runs every day, every night, forever. Nothing about the operation is quiet, intermittent, or seasonal.
Servers run hot. Cooling them at scale is the single biggest operational expense, and the two methods both have local costs.
Evaporative cooling, the cheaper option, sprays water through cooling towers and lets it evaporate into the air. A single hyperscale building can evaporate 1 to 5 million gallons per day. That water is gone, it doesn't return to the lake, it leaves as humidity.
Closed-loop cooling uses less water but more electricity, which means more transmission lines and a higher bill for every household in ERCOT.
Cedar Creek Reservoir is operated by the Tarrant Regional Water District (TRWD) as a drinking-water source for Fort Worth and 1.2 million people across North Texas. Adding industrial evaporative demand on top of municipal demand during drought years is how lakes shrink and stay shrunk.
This was not hypothetical. According to correspondence with TRWD, Diode Ventures requested 5 million gallons of raw water per day from Cedar Creek, to be drawn through a new, dedicated intake on the reservoir, not the existing TRWD intake. That single request was several times the entire daily residential demand of the West Cedar Creek MUD system that would have delivered it. Diode has since pulled out, but the water they wanted is still there for the next applicant to ask for.
TRWD's own staff pushed back, in writing. They called 5 MGD "a large volume of water," noted that "the current public sentiment is that data centers are wasteful when it comes to water," and asked the developer to prove otherwise, to explain why the project can't recirculate, capture rainwater, or use retaining ponds the way some facilities already do.
The buy-in alone is steep. TRWD's raw-water rate is $1,862,171 per MGD, which puts the 5 MGD request at roughly $9.3 million just to secure the supply, before a foot of pipeline or a single filtration plant is built.
The local utility has already drawn a line. On May 21, 2026 the West Cedar Creek MUD Board, the district that would actually deliver this water, adopted a resolution temporarily suspending new service commitments to “High-Intensity Water Customers”: any project projected to exceed 250,000 gallons per day or to materially strain pressure, storage, treatment, or drought capacity. The 5 MGD request is roughly 20 times that trigger. The suspension runs through April 15, 2027 while the District completes capacity and drought-resiliency studies. Read the resolution →
The math is simple. Every gallon a data center evaporates is a gallon Fort Worth doesn't drink, a gallon that doesn't flow past the dock, and a gallon a bass tournament doesn't fish.
Lake property is desirable because the lake is full, the air is clean, and the nights are quiet. Industrial neighbors break all three, and take the County's tax base down with them.
Property assessments in Loudoun and Prince William counties, Virginia's "Data Center Alley," show 8 to 15% reductions in market value within one mile of new data-center campuses. The effects are concentrated on properties with line-of-sight or downwind exposure, exactly the waterfront and near-water homes that dominate Henderson County's taxable value.
And the value hit isn't limited to one mile. The noise, light, and traffic depress the homes nearest the fence, but the water draw threatens the whole lake. Take 5 million gallons a day and lower the pool, and every property around all 320 miles of shoreline loses value at once, the docks over mud, the "waterfront" lots no longer on the water. That is the overwhelming majority of the County's taxable base, and it moves together.
That is why the "new tax revenue" pitch doesn't add up. A hyperscale campus almost always arrives with a Chapter 312 abatement that waives most of its tax bill for a decade, while permanently knocking down home values, near the campus from the industry, and lake-wide if the water goes. The property-tax income the County loses can easily exceed every dollar the data center ever pays, and unlike the abatement, that loss never expires. We're asking for an independent fiscal-impact study before any abatement vote.
Cedar Creek's economy is overwhelmingly tourism, recreation, and second-home residential. Marinas, bait shops, restaurants on the water, lake-rental businesses, fishing guides, real estate, and weekend visitors from DFW all depend on the lake remaining the reason people drive two hours east on a Friday afternoon.
You cannot un-industrialize a lake. Once a campus is approved, the rest of the corridor follows, that's the explicit business model. They cluster.
See the local tax math & impact map →To sidestep the years-long wait for a grid connection, the applicant intends to generate its own electricity on-site, by burning natural gas around the clock.
A single hyperscale campus draws 100 to 500 megawatts, the consumption of a midsize Texas city. Connecting that much new load to ERCOT can take years, so a growing number of data centers are skipping the grid altogether and building their own on-site natural gas turbines instead.
That is what is proposed here. It means a private power plant operating next to family homes and open water, burning gas continuously to keep the servers running. Self-generation does not relieve the lake of the cooling-water demand, and it puts a combustion source, with its emissions and its noise, in a residential, recreational setting that has never hosted heavy industry.
On-site generation can also route around the public oversight that utility-scale power plants face. The emissions, the air permit, and the round-the-clock turbine noise land on the neighbors, while the facility captures discounted gas and, often, a Chapter 312 / 313 property-tax abatement that leaves the school and hospital districts with the impacts and none of the revenue.
The single most-reported complaint from neighbors of operating data centers is sound. Not just the diesel generators during outages, the cooling fans that run constantly, in every season, around the clock.
Independent measurements at Virginia and Northern Virginia sites have recorded continuous 65 to 85 decibels at the fence line, with low-frequency components that travel further and are harder to block than ordinary traffic noise. The Loudoun County board has fielded complaints from homes over a mile away.
There is no current Texas state noise standard that meaningfully limits industrial cooling noise in rural areas. Henderson County does not have one either. Until it does, the only protection a homeowner has is distance and tree cover, and once a data center is built, neither is negotiable.
Sources: EPA noise guidance; Loudoun County citizen monitoring; Prince William County 2024 sound survey.
18 to 30 months of heavy-truck convoys on county roads not built for them. Repair costs come out of county budgets, not developer budgets.
On-site gas turbines burn fuel 24/7, and diesel backup generators add fine particulate matter (PM2.5) on top during testing and outages. Downwind homes get the dose.
Security lighting and substation work areas are bright by design. Rural night sky disappears within visual range of the campus.
Battery backup rooms have caught fire at multiple US sites. Rural volunteer fire departments do not train for or have equipment for lithium fires.
Cooling water concentrates minerals and biocides. Discharge requires permits the county is not staffed to oversee.
Construction jobs are 18-month contracts. Permanent positions are 30 to 200, mostly technical roles filled from out-of-area.
Diode walked away because this community organized. The next developer will look at the same cheap land and plentiful water. The way we keep winning is to stay organized and grow. Add your name, and help us reach 10,000.